Tennessee's 2024 law extends likeness protection to voice

The persona

No single persona anchors this entry. The subject is a state statute: Tennessee's Senate Bill 2096 renamed the state's 1984 Personal Rights Protection Act as the Ensuring Likeness, Voice, and Image Security Act of 2024, or ELVIS Act, adding a new protection for an individual's voice. Any operator producing a voice or likeness identifiable as a real Tennessee resident's, without consent, is the use the amended statute addresses.

What the documents establish

The enacted bill text defines voice as any sound in a medium that is readily identifiable and attributable to a particular individual, whether or not the sound is an actual recording or a simulation, closing a gap that older right-of-publicity language covering only name, photograph, or likeness did not reach. The amended statute gives every individual a property right in the commercial use of their name, photograph, voice, or likeness, and creates three grounds for civil liability: knowing commercial use without consent; distributing a voice or likeness known to be unauthorized; and distributing an algorithm, software, or other tool whose primary purpose is producing an unauthorized voice, photograph, or likeness. The General Assembly's own bill status record shows Governor Bill Lee signed the measure on 21 March 2024 as Public Chapter 588, with the act's own text setting an effective date of 1 July 2024.

Character versus company

The ELVIS Act protects a real, living or deceased person's voice and likeness; it does not create rights for a wholly fictional persona with no underlying human performer. An operator building a synthetic character modeled on a real Tennessee musician's voice falls under the consent requirement, and a tool vendor whose product's main function is producing that imitation could face liability under the third category of claim, independent of whoever uses the tool. The statute does not regulate a persona's branding or marketing; it addresses producing or distributing the imitation, not how a character is later presented. No court decision applying the statute to a virtual-influencer dispute appears in the sources reviewed here.

What to watch

The bill status record confirms passage and an effective date, not any enforcement history; it will take future litigation to show how courts read a term like primary purpose against a general-purpose AI voice tool. This is an editorial read: the third liability category is broad enough to reach tool developers as well as end users, distinguishing Tennessee's law from statutes that only reach whoever publishes the final work.

• Has any operator of a synthetic persona cited the ELVIS Act, either as a shield or as a source of liability?
• Does a given voice-cloning or voice-synthesis tool's marketing describe a primary purpose that could trigger the statute's third category of claim?
• Has Tennessee issued guidance or case law clarifying what counts as a voice that is readily identifiable under the amended definition?

The ELVIS Act's text is the clearest record of what changed in Tennessee law in 2024: a broadened definition of protected likeness, a new category of tool-level liability, and a July 2024 effective date. How any specific operator might be affected remains a matter for future documented cases.